


And It Was Good

by Vera (Vera_DragonMuse)



Category: Supernatural
Genre: M/M, Tumblr Prompt, season 9 sort of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-08
Updated: 2013-11-08
Packaged: 2017-12-31 21:54:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,043
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1036802
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vera_DragonMuse/pseuds/Vera
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>whitmerule prompted:  Castiel/Gabriel (or Castiel & Gabriel), finding each other after the fall. </p>
<p>This is an extended version of the original ficlet.</p>
            </blockquote>





	And It Was Good

His feet hurt. Castiel wouldn’t have thought that a simple ache could be so distracting, but his shoes don’t quite fit right and he often stood for too many hours until he could retreat to his dingy apartment. The grind of this tiny suffering wore him down then a hundred sharper hurts. Hot showers helped a little, water pounding over the spread of his shoulders and easing the tension.

Tonight, he considered falling asleep against the shower wall though he knows it wouldn’t end well. He might have tried anyway if there hadn’t been a knock on his door.

He opened the door a crack with a gun in his hand, a solid loaded piece that Dean had given it to him. An apology? A door prize to humanity? It was difficult to tell, but Castiel was grateful for it just then.

"Is that a gun in your hand or are you just really pissed off to see me?"

"Brother." He breathed out, gutted. "Where did you come from?"

"I walked from a grey place." Gabriel smiled, the familiar smirk on a vessel’s mouth. Even robbed of the penetrating vision of an angel, Castiel recognized his brother. "I walked through the valley of the shadow…well. Of shadows. I think I should sit down."

With that, it was as if taut strings were cut. Gabriel collapsed in slow motion to the floor. He didn’t rouse as Castiel dragged him inside nor as Castiel settled him onto his bed. Castiel stared at him, watched the too thin chest rise and fall with breaths that the body shouldn’t require. The bed wasn’t very large, but Castiel feared the effects of sleeping in the chair again. He curled himself up tight beside his brother and slept as lightly as he could. 

In the morning, he found Gabriel still asleep. Castiel had to go to work, but he stood torn for so long that he had to run the last few blocks to clock in on time. 

All through the day, Castiel’s thoughts returned to Gabriel. He half-hoped Gabriel would vanish while he worked and plague someone else with his impossibility, but the other half… Gabriel was their ally at the last. And in the beginning, he and Castiel had stared out over a vast ocean. They had both hung in the salted air and watched a fish flop triumphantly onto a beach. There were things they had been, he and Gabriel, both together and apart that few other beings left alive could comprehend. 

It was pleasure that bloomed in Castiel when he returned home to find Gabriel sitting up on the bed, the television with its few channels providing a ghastly light.

"I brought dinner." He offered, Gabriel’s attention heavy on him as the door closed behind him. 

Castiel set the bag of take out on the table. He didn’t have much, but he could afford a few luxuries now. Like Chinese food, steaming hot, tasting not of the China he remembered, but the one he has come to associate with hotel rooms and Sam’s nose twitching over steaming soup. 

"Do I need it?" Gabriel rose, unsteady still and hobbled to the folding table, dropping into the other chair. That chair usually held up Castiel’s few books, instead of another body. It was good to sit down in his own familiar seat and serve two instead of one.

"I don’t know. I don’t know what you are." Castiel gave him plastic cutlery and the container orange chicken.

"What are you?" Gabriel speared a piece of chicken, ate it without giving it much thought. How much easier this must be for him, having lived so long on earth.

"Mortal. Robbed of my grace."

"Yeah? Who by?" 

"Metatron." Castiel cracked open the wonton soup, inhaled the salted steam.

"That asshole?" Gabriel snorted. "I thought he was long gone. He the reason I’m here?" 

"Did you not see? Can’t you hear?" Castiel stared, food momentarily forgotten.

"Oh. Angel Radio." Gabriel shrugged. "Haven’t heard a peep."

"That’s unlikely. The others still seem able to communicate."

"I was dead, kiddo. Who knows what that did to my reception?"

"That begs the question of how you were resurrected."

"It begs a lot of things, but beggers can’t be choosers." The white plastic fork sank into another piece of chicken. "And I think I’m at begger status."

They ate the rest in silence. Apparently Gabriel did require food or at least, felt some kind of hunger. He ate his container bare and finished the rest of Castiel’s fried rice to boot.

"Ugh. Tired again." Gabriel yawned. “Don’t know if I’m one hundred percent earthly goods, but I’m definitely feeling less than my usual awesome self.” 

"The others were thrown out from heaven." It seemed best to get it out of the way. "They blame me." 

"Was it you?" 

"The Metatron tricked me." It sounded pathetic to him now, this refrain. A push of blame. He was tricked, but he had also done all of Heaven great wrongs. What did it matter which one his siblings blamed him for? They all came to rest on his shoulders somehow. "He used my grace to finish the spell." 

"Booted from Heaven." Gabriel stared blankly into space. "And I can’t hear them. Strange. I spent so long blocking them out. You’d think the silence would be a relief." 

"How did you find me?" It was the wrong question, but it shamed Castiel that it had only now occurred to him to ask. This was why Dean had asked him to leave. All trouble found him in the end. 

"I didn’t. I told you. I walked until I got here." 

"Yes, but why here?" 

"I don’t know." Gabriel blinked, once, twice and then shook his head like a dog throwing off water. "Fuck. I think I need a shower." 

Castiel got him a towel, offering it up. Gabriel stood slowly and let out a soft huff of pain. 

"What hurts?" 

"Nothing." Gabriel took the towel, but his body betrayed him when he moved towards the bathroom. His right leg gave out and only Castiel’s shoulder prevented him from collapsing. 

"Let me see." Castiel cajoled. 

He took off Gabriel’s battered sneakers, peeled away socks that had forgotten their whiteness and found raw flesh. Gabriel had walked on tender mortal feet until they blistered and bled. One ankle looked swollen and bruised, but as far as Castiel could tell, it wasn’t broken. 

Healing was out of his control, but there were things humans did to tend each other. Castiel got down his First Aid kit, another of Dean’s parting parcels. Then he found a bowl and filled it with hot water. He knelt down before his brother and as gently as he could, washed Gabriel’s feet. 

"It has been a long time since you bent a knee." Gabriel reached out, his hand sliding through Castiel’s hair. "Longer since you meant it." 

"How would you know?" 

"I know. I know how obedience tastes." Gabriel’s eyelids sank closed, but his hand went on stroking even as Castiel smoothed antiseptic ointment into the split skin. 

"I’m sorry." Castiel said as he began to bind the ankle, putting pressure on the heated flesh. 

"What for?" Gabriel laughed then, a broken up thing. "I’m alive. You’re alive. Our bellies are full and we have a roof over our heads. For tonight, we are lucky men." 

"Is that what we are? Men?" 

"Women. Children. Whatever you want." 

"Not angels?" 

"Castiel." Gabriel’s hold on his hair finally ceased, hand slipping down his cheek to cup his chin. His face was tilted upward, eyes forced to meet Gabriel’s blank expression. "You and I left all that behind long before." 

"I am an angel." Castiel didn’t look away. "We cannot just stop being what we were created because we wish it or because it was torn from us. I will always be an angel." 

"Then we’re a new kind." The thought seemed to please him and for the first time, Gabriel smiled. "There was a man once with a broken heart. He wrote poems. Like… ‘Let the living creature lie,/ Mortal, guilty, but to me / The entirely beautiful’. Let’s be those kinds of angels." 

Castiel tucked Gabriel into the bed, put his hand around Gabriel’s wrist to feel the thrum of in impossible heartbeat there. He counted beats, waves cracking restlessly on the shore. 

He counted. Mortal. He counted. Guilty. He counted. Beautiful. 

He slept. 

“I don’t like dreaming.” Gabriel announced, deep in the grey hours near dawn. 

“What?” Castiel blinked awake. 

“Sleep is bad enough. That loss of yourself, but to dream, to have your mind make up complicated nausting fictions...I don’t like it.” 

“You get used to it.” Castiel mumbled, turning onto his side to find Gabriel staring at him across the pillows. 

“Really?” 

“No.” Castiel pulled the blankets up higher, piling them into a world of dark warmth. 

“You’re such a comfort.” 

Wednesdays were Castiel’s days off. He usually spent them on maintenance tasks and television watching. Gabriel had not complaints about this schedule. He stayed in the nest of blankets, hair stuck up in a hundred directions and his ankle propped up on a pillow. Castiel carried his laundry downstairs and made a call while it cycled through the wash. 

“Cas?” Dean asked, breathless into the phone. “What’s wrong?” 

“Hello, Dean.” Castiel sat on the washer, the vibrations weirdly pleasing. “Nothing, exactly. I have found another angel who was similarly incapacitated to me.” 

“Metatron?”   
“I don’t believe so. I’m not sure if his grace is intact or not. But he is clearly injured and unable to heal. I wanted to know what you would do for an ankle injury. It does not appear broken, but it is swollen.” 

“Oh.” Dean paused and Castiel braced himself for a lecture. There were a dozen very good reasons that Castiel shouldn’t be harboring another angel. Reasons Dean would doubtless tell him at volume. “Bag of frozen peas.” 

“Why?” Castiel frowned. 

“Cold takes down the swelling, ice can be hard to mold into the right shape around an ankle. Wrap it in a few paper towels and swap it out for a fresh one when it starts to melt.” 

“That is very practical. Thank you.” 

“You’re welcome. Be careful, Cas. Angels...” 

“I know. I’ll be cautious.” 

“Good.” 

And that was the end of it. Castiel hung up, cradling the phone in his hand. He tried to pinpoint the feeling as it rose up. He was getting better at, these nuances of emotion. It was pride this time, he thought. Pride because Dean trusted him to keep himself safe. Which should have been insulting really. Yet, from Dean it was an unparalleled gift. 

Castiel carried the pleasant sensation all way with him to the grocery store where he bought several bags of frozen peas. 

“Are you sure about that?” Gabriel hissed when Castiel put the first bag down over the swollen ankle. 

“It was recommended. I have frozen pizza to heat up for dinner. Pepperoni or garden?” 

They wound up splitting them both, a pile of napkins piled up between them and Gabriel’s bad ankle settled between Castiel’s thighs. 

“I think the biggest difference,” Gabriel said out of nowhere, a spot of tomato sauce on the tip of his nose, “is that it’s all so boring and vital at the same time. Pissing, eating, breathing.” 

“We did similarly dull things as angels.” 

“Maybe you did. Maybe I did once. But it was a different kind of boring.” 

“We didn’t know boredom. You have to have...a lack of boredom first to understand what it is.” 

“Ouch.” Gabriel’s lips twitched in a half-smile. “Harsh words, little rebel.” 

“Rebelling against who?” 

The pizza’s crust was soggy in places, not as good as the ones that came from the pizza place. Gabriel picked up a piece of pepperoni and nipped around the edges until it was scalloped all the way round. 

“Do you think he left us?” Eyes locked on the pepperoni, Gabriel no longer looked blank. Not even a little. 

Castiel was still confused about a lot of things that came as second nature to humanity. Yesterday, he’d sneezed hard for the first time and the ensuing chaos in the bathroom had left him red faced. But this...this he knew. This he had observed and maybe, maybe understood. 

He reached across the table and tugged the pepperoni away. He took Gabriel’s hand in his. 

“I don’t know, but it’s his loss if he did.” 

“What if it was because he was disappointed?” 

“It was he that turned his back on us, Gabriel. He that left us alone. Any disappointment he had would be ultimately be in himself. We did the best we could.” 

“I didn’t though, did I?” Gabriel held fast to Castiel’s hand. “I left, I fucked around and wasted time-” 

“You helped save all of creation. You gave your life trying. You tried to save Lucifer even at that final moment. What more could be asked of you?” 

Gabriel didn’t answer. 

The days went so slowly, but then a week would end catching Castiel by surprise. Gabriel healed, began to walk again though Castiel wasn’t sure where he went. Only that he came back every night, sometimes with folded wads of money or a bag of sweets or weird little toys. 

“For the rent.” Gabriel would offer them all up to Castiel. 

The money helped. They bought clothing, better food and a cheap laptop. The internet was harder, demanding more of a real identity than either of them had. Instead, they took it down to the Starbucks and explored the internet in faltering fits and starts with hands that shook from caffeine poisoning. 

Eventually, Castiel sent an email to Sam, pleased when it was promptly returned full of chatty ghoulish news and ready affection. Their correspondence became a steady thing. Even the confession of Gabriel’s presence couldn’t put a true dent in it.   
_He did right by us in the end. I should probably still hate him, but I don’t have the energy._ Sam wrote and Dean added a misspelled postscripts that promised deadly harm if Gabriel should step out of line. 

“That’s sweet.” Gabriel read it over Castiel’s shoulder. “Nice that they think I’ve still got enough bite to be dangerous.” 

“It was never your powers that made you dangerous.” Castiel smiled at the picture Sam had attached of Dean brandishing a wicked knife. 

It snowed on the two month anniversary of Gabriel’s arrival. At first it was merely pretty, something for Castiel to admire out the window as he worked. Then it grew fierce, stinging at his eyes and numbing his fingers as he walked home. 

“You look frosted.” Gabriel laughed when Castiel walked in, but he got up and knocked snow from Castiel’s hair and off his shoulders. “I’ll make some hot chocolate.” 

The small flakes grew fat. The usual noise and chaos of the human world hushed under the assault. Gabriel stared out the window for so long, Castiel gravitated toward him. 

“It was always like this once. Remember?” 

“Quiet, you mean?” 

“And blank. The whole of creation just a canvas.” Gabriel leaned into him and Castiel took his weight easily, one arm around Gabriel’s shoulders. “We had no idea what could be drawn onto it. I remember...I don’t know. I suppose it was joy.” 

“It was only ignorance.” Castiel sighed, his breath briefly obscuring the glass. “I don’t think I was ever happy until I began to truly look at what had been made here. Who had been created.” 

“I met a girl in a forest and she was dancing. It was the first time I smiled with this vessel’s mouth.” 

“I made Dean laugh.” 

“I gave a woman back her husband.” 

“I got drunk.” 

“I learned to ride a horse.” 

They shared all of it that night while the world stayed soft and quiet for them. The bed held them when the room grew too cold. They fell asleep with their legs tangled together. 

In the morning, they darted out into the perfect stillness of the street and walked crazed patterns into the snow. Gabriel threw the first snowball, but Castiel threw the last, a hard icy thing that sent Gabriel bodily toward him. They fell together into the snow, sweating and freezing. 

“It’s all amazing.” Castiel smiled up at the cloudy sky. “All of it. Even the fucking terrible parts.” 

“You swore!” Gabriel wheezed and then, gloriously, he laughed. Not an ironic huff or a bitter broken thing, but a full on chest heaving belly laugh. “You’ve been utterly corrupted.” 

“Fuck.” He said again then laughed too, for the sheer joy of it. 

“Awesome.” Gabriel leaned down, his nose freezing cold where it brushed Castiel’s cheek. “You...you. Castiel.”

“Mmm.” He agreed. 

Gabriel kissed him, deliberate and cool. 

They lost the winter in each other. No matter what came later, Castiel knew he would have these memories to come back to. Maybe humans couldn’t recall with the same precision of angels, but the blurry sweetness of them was almost better. He could remember the give of Gabriel beneath him, the drag of skin catching over skin and the thick smell of sex caught between their blankets without all the unimportant details. 

He could remember the night that Gabriel burrowed into him until they were wrapped so tightly together that they might have become one entity, 

“Maybe Dad is still out there somewhere,” the whispered words brushed through Castiel’s hair, “because this feels too much like a reward.” 

“It’s not. I’m not.” Castiel pulled him impossibly closer. “It’s just life. Real human life.” 

“Stop being so smart. I’m trying to be sentimental.” Gabriel groaned. 

“It doesn’t suit you.” 

“Cruel man.” 

“Better than a foolish one.” 

“Better than an angel.” 

Castiel’s breath caught in his throat, “Do you really think so?” 

“Sure.” Gabriel yawned. “I mean it still sucks half the time, it’s hard and messy and annoying, but...it’s good too. Just like this.” 

“And God saw that it was good.” Castiel kissed Gabriel’s forehead. 

“Fuck him.” Gabriel pulled the blankets up higher. “The former archangel Gabriel looked over these come stained sheets and called it good.” 

And it was good.


End file.
